Making Exceptions: Rethinking Success through the Lives of the Siamese Twins

Abstract

Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese Twins,” led extremely successful lives in the U.S. despite their vivid racial and bodily difference. Scholars in Asian American Studies and Disability Studies have interrogated their anomalous status, but the content and function of the twins’ “success” remains underanalyzed. This article argues that the twins were produced as exceptions whose provisional success necessitated continuous performances of normalcy and acquiescence to a violent social order of exceptional nationalism that targeted “abnormal” people. Thus, “success stories” like the twins are never mere anomalies, but must be examined in relation to structural forces of devaluation.